Mike Ferraro (center) And The Young Republicans celebrate the launch of their self-released debut CD on February 24

Despair! Heartbreak! Suicide! Calamity! No, it’s not the six o’clock news, it’s the long-awaited debut album from Mike Ferraro and the Young Republicans.

The indie-pop trio, with a drummer who lives in the Mile Square City and a longtime Hoboken rehearsal space, celebrates the release of its new CD “What’s Yours Is Mine” tonight at Maxwell’s, on an all-star bill that includes New Brunswick’s Readymade Breakup and Asbury Park’s Colie Brice & The New Age Blues Experience.

“Yes, this album took a terribly long time,” said Ferraro, a singer/songwriter who often performs as a solo artist at Hoboken’s Northern Soul original music nights. “Years, literally years it took. To give you an idea, the first round of mastering ( a process done only when all of the actual recording is finished) was done over a year ago. We threw away all those masters and did it again, and then we sat on it for months and months before deciding on a release date. And that was totally appropriate given how long it took us to do everything else involved with making the record. A lot of it was just scheduling, really, trying to find a few hours a week for the three of us to get together and work on it.”

“That said, though, I think the album sounds remarkably consistent,” he added. “I don’t think the songs sound like they were each recorded separately over a period of years. I do think everything on this record sounds like it belongs together.” What’s more, remarkable, Ferraro noted, is that some of the songs go back as far as eight years, to when he first started writing and performing as a solo artist.

Besides Ferraro, bassist Jon Andrew also performs his own original material; he and drummer Ralph Capasso have been fixtures in the New Jersey indie music scene for more than a decade, playing in myriad bands including Souls Release, Angry Monsters, Hey Tiger, and others. The band members come from different parts of the state but do think of Hoboken as their home base.

“I don’t actually live in Hoboken but I do live in our rehearsal space sometimes, or at least it feels that way,” Ferarro said. “I spend entirely too much time there, all day sometimes. We recorded a lot of the album there, doing it all ourselves, trying to learn how to record and get the best sounds on our own without going into a studio. Ralph engineered the whole thing but it was really a learning process for all of us.

“Hoboken’s become an in-between stop for me, since I’m in the city going to grad school now,” Ferraro noted. “But even before that, I’ve always loved just being in Hoboken. It’s got this small town feeling and yet you can encounter all these weirdos just walking around the streets. I’ve written a lot of lyrics just walking around town. I especially love the south end of town. Our rehearsal space is in the south west corner of the city, sort of that industrial wasteland where the city just stops and it gets all weird. And I love that area around City Hall and the train station. Sometimes I’ll just sit in the waiting room there for hours just thinking or reading a book, just me and the homeless late at night. I just really like that, I find it a great source of inspiration.”

Listening to “What’s Yours Is Mine,” one wonders exactly where that inspiration came from. While the music often has a bright, jangly, upbeat quality, Ferraro’s lyrics tend to be downbeat if not downright morose. Relationship songs end badly; loneliness trumps happiness. “Jumper” is about a suicide, while in “Scorched White Earth,” Ferraro sings that the main character “died a year ago today, with your sister by your side, in a car crash, and nobody knew your name.”

“I often think my life is an accident,” Ferraro joked. “So that line makes perfect sense.” He noted that a critic once wrote that his music was “twice as depressing as Bright Eyes.”

“I write songs from a very melancholy place,” Ferraro admitted. “I don’t try to hide that. I do think the music sounds upbeat in places though. If you think this stuff is dark, you should hear my solo recordings. I just try to be very impressionistic. I don’t even think of my songs as having any sort of story to them. But if they do, they definitely don’t have happy endings.”

Mike Ferraro & The Young Republicans will appear at Maxwell’s (1039 Washington St. Hoboken) tonight. Also appearing are The Sunday Blues, Readymade Breakup, and Colie Brice & The New Age Blues Experience. Doors open at 8 p.m. and admission is $8. For more information, visit www.mikeferraro.net.